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Lucy (also given a second
(Amharic) name: dinqineš, or
“Dinkenesh,” meaning “You are beautiful” or "you are wonderful") is
the common name of AL 288-1, the nearly 40% complete skeleton of an
Australopithecus
afarensis specimen discovered in 1974
at Hadar in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression. Lucy is estimated to have lived 3.2 million
years ago. The discovery of this hominid
was significant as the skeleton shows evidence of small skull
capacity akin to that of apes and of bipedal upright walk akin to that of humans, providing further evidence that
bipedalism preceded increase in brain size in human evolution. In
1994, a new hominid, Ardi was found, pushing
back the earliest known hominid date to 4.4 million years ago.
Details of this discovery were finally published in October
2009.

In November 1973, near the end of the first field season, Johanson
noticed a fossil of the upper end of a shinbone, which had been
sliced slightly on the front. The lower end of a thighbone was
found near to it, and when he fitted them together the angle of the
knee joint clearly showed that this fossil, reference AL 129-1, was an upright walking hominid. Over three million years old, the fossil
was much older than any others known at the time. The site lay
about two and a half kilometres from the site at which they
subsequently found "Lucy".

The team returned for the second field season in the following year
and found hominid jaws. Then, on the morning of November 24, 1974,
near the Awash
River, Johanson abandoned a plan to update his field
notes and joined graduate student, Tom Gray from Texas State, in
taking their Land Rover to Locality 162
to search for bone fossils.

Both Donald Johanson and Tom Gray spent a couple of hours on the
increasingly hot arid plains, surveying the dusty terrain, then
Johanson decided on a hunch to make a small detour on their way
back to the Land Rover to look at the bottom of a small gully that had been checked at least twice before by
other workers. At first sight there was virtually no bone in the
gully, but as they turned to leave, a fossil caught Johanson's eye;
an arm bone fragment lying on the slope. Near it lay a fragment
from the back of a small skull. They noticed part of a femur (thighbone) a few feet (around 1m) away. As they
looked further, they found more and more bones on the slope,
including vertebrae, part of a pelvis indicating that the fossil
was female, ribs, and pieces of jaw. They marked the spot and
returned to camp, excited at finding so many pieces apparently from
one individual hominid.

Cast of Lucy in Mexico

In the afternoon, everyone on the expedition was at the gully,
sectioning off the site and preparing for careful collection which
eventually took three weeks. That first evening they celebrated at
the camp, staying up all night, and at some stage during the
evening the fossil AL 288-1 was nicknamed Lucy,
after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds", which was being played loudly and repeatedly on a
tape recorder in the camp.

Over the three weeks, several hundred pieces or fragments of bone
were found, with no duplication, confirming their original
speculation that they were from the one skeleton. As the team
analyzed the fossil further, they calculated that an amazing 40% of
a hominin skeleton had been recovered, an astounding accomplishment
in the world of anthropology. Usually, only fossil fragments are
discovered; rarely are skulls or ribs found intact. Johanson
considered it was female based on the one
complete pelvic bone and sacrum indicating the width of the pelvic
opening. Lucy was only 1.1 m (3 feet 8 inches) tall, weighed
29 kilograms (65 lb) and looked somewhat like a Common Chimpanzee, but although the
creature had a small brain, the pelvis and leg bones were almost
identical in function with those of modern humans, showing with
certainty that these hominids had walked erect.Under an agreement
with the government of Ethiopia, Johanson brought the skeleton back
to Cleveland where it was reconstructed by Owen Lovejoy. It was
returned according to agreement some 9 years later. Lucy as a
fossil hominin significantly captured public notice, becoming
almost a household name at the time.

Further discoveries of afarensis specimens occurred during
the 1970s giving anthropologists a much better appreciation of the
range of variability and sexual dimorphism of the species.

Notable characteristics

The body height of Lucy is estimated as about 3 feet 6 inches
(1.07 meters).

Postcranial

One of the most striking characteristics possessed by Lucy was a
valgus knee, which indicated that she
normally moved by walking upright. Her
femoral head was small and her
femoral neck was short, both primitive characteristics. Her
greater trochanter, however, was
clearly derived, being short and human like rather than taller than
the femoral head. The length ratio of her humerus to femur was 84.6%
compared to 71.8% for modern humans and 97.8% for common
chimpanzees, indicating that either the arms of A.
afarensis were beginning to shorten, the legs were beginning
to lengthen, or that both were occurring simultaneously. Lucy also
possessed a lumbar curve, another
indicator of habitual bipedalism.

Pelvic girdle

Johanson was able to recover Lucy's left innominate bone and sacrum.
Though the sacrum was remarkably well preserved, the innominate was
distorted, leading to two different reconstructions. The first
reconstruction had little iliac flare and virtually no anterior
wrap, creating an ilium that greatly
resembled that of an ape. However, this reconstruction proved to be
faulty, as the superior pubic
rami would not have been able to connect if the right ilium was
identical to the left. A later reconstruction by Tim White showed a broad iliac
flare and a definite anterior wrap, indicating that Lucy had an
unusually broad inner acetabular distance
and unusually long superior pubic rami. Her pubic arch was over 90 degrees, similar to modern
human females. Her acetabulum, however,
was small and primitive.

US tour

A six-year exhibition tour of the United States, titled Lucy’s
Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia, features the
Lucy fossil as well as over 100 artifacts from ancient
times to the present, is currently underway. The tour was approved
by the Ethiopian government and organized in collaboration with the
Houston
Museum of Natural Science, where it had been on display from August 31, 2007 until September 1, 2008, along
with an original Digital Dome Theater (Planetarium) feature film
about the origins of lucy called Lucy’s Cradle, the Birth of Wonder, featuring
music by Shai Fishman, recorded and produced at Fish-i Studios -
http://www.fish-i.com. An undisclosed proportion of the
proceeds from the tour is to go toward modernizing Ethiopia's
museums. The U.S.Department of State also approved the tour. There was
controversy in advance of the tour over concerns about the
fragility of the specimens, with various experts including
paleoanthropologist Owen Lovejoy and anthropologist and
conservationist Richard Leakey
publicly stating their opposition. The Smithsonian Institution and Cleveland Museum of Natural
History were among museums declining to host the
exhibits. The fossil's discoverer Don Johanson stated that
although he was somewhat uneasy about the possibility of damage, he
did not oppose exhibiting Lucy as it will help to raise awareness
of human-origins studies. The museum is making arrangements for the
exhibits to be shown at as many as ten other museums. The exhibit was shown
at the Pacific
Science Center in Seattle, Washington where it was displayed from October 4, 2008 - March
8, 2009.In September 2008, between the exhibits in
Houston and Seattle, the fossils were taken to the University
of Texas at Austin for 10 days to complete the first ever high
resolution CT scan of the
fossil.

University of
Texas's eLucy.org website Enables visitors to view bones and
bone casts, and learn more about human origins and evolution.
Activities and lessons are provided to encourage additional
study.